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The “New:” A Colonization of Non-Modern Scholars and Knowledges

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 June 2020

Shara Cherniak  and
Ashli Moore Walker
Shara Cherniak*
Affiliation:
Educational Theory and Practice, University of Georgia Athens, GA30602
Ashli Moore Walker
Affiliation:
Educational Theory and Practice, University of Georgia Athens, GA30602
*
Corresponding authors. Email: schernia@gmail.com, ashlidwalker@gmail.com
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Abstract

We engage in an affirmative feminist reading of the recent, predominantly Western, philosophical movement called the new materialisms—that is, we problematize the “new” while still valuing its contributions toward justice (Todd 2016; Schaeffer 2018). We put Sara Ahmed in conversation with María Lugones and Zoe Todd in order to recognize that not only have feminist scholars engaged in conversations around the material before publications of the “new” (Ahmed 2008; Lugones 2010; Todd 2016), but we also argue that the “new” creates a coloniality of non-modern knowledges that think and live some of the so-called groundbreaking ideas of the “new.” The new materialisms, then, function systematically to deny and silence the multiple and varied ways in which the concepts it engages have a prolonged and deep scholarship of theorization in both feminisms and non-modern knowledges. The significance of this, we contend, is not merely a question of semantics as (some) authors of the “new” purport—language matters. That is, language materializes the world; it affects. In engendering this philosophy as “new,” it acts, in effect, as a colonization that reinforces harmful and violent discourses of white, neoliberal, colonial capitalism (Lugones 2010) that some feminist theories seek to dismantle.

Type
Articles
Information
Hypatia , Volume 35 , Special Issue 3: Toward Decolonial Feminisms: Tracing the Lineages of Decolonial Thinking through Latin American/Latinx Feminist Philosophy , Summer 2020 , pp. 424 - 438
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Hypatia, a Nonprofit Corporation.

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